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Bring the Devils Home?

The Few, The Proud, The Murderers

By
Pierre Tristam

06/28/06

"Candide’s
Notebooks" -- -- Of course the first line of
defense, for those craven enough to defend atrocities just because
Americans commit them, is to say that Iraqis do worse. And in fact the
U.S. military, after lying about the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in
Haditha last year, then lying about the number of Iraqis killed, then
covering up the massacre until
a Time magazine article
made it impossible to keep lying, attempted that very line of defense:
As Time reported in March, “Lieut. Colonel Michelle Martin-Hing,
spokeswoman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq, told Time the involvement
of [military investigators] does not mean that a crime occurred. And she
says the fault for the civilian deaths lies squarely with the
insurgents, who ‘placed noncombatants in the line of fire as the Marines
responded to defend themselves.’” All lies, of course. There were no
insurgents hiding among civilians. There was no crossfire. The Marines
weren’t defending themselves. They were out on a rampage, murdering at
point-blank leisure, lodging bullets in the heads of women and children,
My Lai-style.

There
is one buried quarter truth in Michelle Martin’s official story (odd,
how her name rhymes with the name of
that most craven of right-wing
bloggers, to whom apologizing for brutality, as long as it’s
camouflaged in stars and stripes, is a back-seat shtick), though it
doesn’t justify what happened in Haditha: When you train men not only to
kill but to become sub-human drones who dehumanize their enemy in turn,
and when you place them in situations where they want to see
nothing but sub-human creatures,
you can’t expect them not to act the
part they’ve been trained to act.

I keep
remembering that Bob Herbert column in the Times last May, relating the
story of
Aidan Delgado,
a U.S. soldier who served in Iraq: “He wasn’t happy when, even before
his unit left the states,” Herbert wrote, “a top officer made wisecracks
about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn
some turbans. ‘He laughed,’ Mr. Delgado said, ‘and everybody in the unit
laughed with him.’ The officer's comment was a harbinger of the
gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely
inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: ‘Guys in my
unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and
shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd
keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people’s
heads.’ He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this
practice. ‘I said to them: ‘What the hell are you doing? Like, what does
this accomplish?’ And they responded just completely openly. They said:
‘Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being
surrounded by hajis.’’ ‘Haji’ is the troops’ term of choice for an
Iraqi. It’s used the way ‘gook’ or ‘Charlie’ was used in Vietnam. Mr.
Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed
a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal
planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There
were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and
curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.” (The
full column is available
here.) The banality of
evil doesn’t have to rise to the level of genocide to find its stage. To
the contrary. Evil at its most routine is localized affair, the more
debased for being either completely out of sight and accountability, or
for being tacitly, happily condoned by its executioner’s posse. The
Haditha massacre stands out only because in its case someone was there
to report it. But who doubts that these atrocities aren’t routine, or
that a soldier’s swift kick in the chest of a six year old boy is any
less of an atrocity, considering what that soldier would do to an adult
if can be such a brute toward children?

What’s
almost as repulsive, though in this case only ink is being spilled, not
blood, is the way the subsequent reporting about the massacre is being
laid out. The New York Times
the morning of May 26,
with its usual, but in this case nauseating, restraint in balance’s
name, pulls a classic example of mitigating atrocity with qualifiers.
The lead paragraph refers to a small number of marines carrying
out “extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians,” establishing right
away the rogue-soldier theory that was attempted in the aftermath of Abu
Ghraib.

The downplaying of U.S. torture as an institutional rather than an
exceptional strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan was successful, at least in
the public’s mind.
The evidence suggests otherwise.
It does so as well when it comes to wanton killings, whether it’s the
trigger-happy soldiering at Iraqi
checkpoints or the killing of civilians in allegedly
collateral circumstances. Yet you can see the Haditha massacre’s
dowplaying game already in full swing. The Times has the story over two
columns above the fold, but to the left of a four-column spread about
the
Enron verdict. Enron is
news. It isn’t bigger news than the massacre of twenty-four Iraqis at
the hands of U.S. marines. Not by any stretch of journalistic
calibration. But such are the tastes for news in the United States that
business porn will always outplay patriotism’s barbarity. Americans
don’t want to know what their soldiers are doing in their name in Iraq.
The cost to Iraqis is immense. It’s more devastating, especially in
human terms, than anything Enron ever did. But it’s safer to focus on
old-fashioned homegrown corruption and malfeasance. In that sense Ken
Lay and Jeffrey Skilling are doing the American public a favor, in
distractions and entertainment, and the public is grateful. They may be
bad guys, but they’re our bad guys, and they’re providing cover
for what our supposedly good guys, our supposedly heroic soldiers, under
the leadership and don’t-mess-with-Texas-encouragement of their
apologist-in-chief, are doing in Iraq.

For
the record, the Los Angeles Times’
lead about the massacre
had none of the New York Times’ daintiness. It was to the point:
“Marines from Camp Pendleton wantonly killed unarmed Iraqi civilians,
including women and children, and then tried to cover up the slayings in
the insurgent stronghold of Haditha, military investigations have
found.” The Washington Post, spokespaper to American militarism,
ignored the story altogether until
Saturday. One more point about the Times story. The very last
paragraph raises the prospect of yet another massacre, though it reads
like an afterthought: “The Marines also disclosed this week that a
preliminary inquiry had found ‘sufficient information’ to recommend a
criminal probe into the killing of an Iraqi civilian on April 26 near
Hamandiyah, a village west of Baghdad.” But isn’t the discovery and
uncovering of atrocity always an afterthought, if even that?

06/01/06 "Information
Clearing House" -- -- The United States Marine Corps was
already on it's last legs as an elite fighting force, our reputation
sullied by the dishonorable and sometimes criminal actions perpetrated
by bottom of the barrel Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers in Iraq.
Now this. We are now observing the death throes of the oldest fighting
force in America.

We had a good run, from November 10, 1775 to 2006. These dates may now
be etched into the tombstone of an institution that has epitomized the
meaning of the phrase "Duty, Honor, Country." Sure, we had our warts
over the decades, but somehow our leaders throughout the many wars we
fought managed to pull back from the brink and handle our problems
internally. No more. From the Commandant on down, with this incident,
this atrocity, the Corps has shown the world that it is now leaderless.
The Marine Corps is now in the same league with the American Division in
My Lai, Vietnam and a Lieutenant by the name of Calley. Murderers.

Prior to this war, we were trained to be killers, not murderers. We
killed combatants, not women and children. Murder was not only not
condoned, it was punished in the extreme as we envisioned ourselves as
the "good guys" among the armed forces, at least when it came to helping
and protecting civilians in the countries we fought in. In the not too
distant past, Marines died assisting civilians, as we have since our
inception. The CAP (Civil Action Patrol) program in Vietnam is a prime
example of Marines helping civilians above and beyond the call of duty.
This is but one example, one side of the Corps that didn't see much ink.
We took pride in our work. Many Marines died protecting civilians
throughout our long history, and look at us now.

It would be easy to put the blame on the cowards, the evil bastards that
inhabit the White House, Pentagon, and the "military-industrial complex"
but the blame lays squarely on the shoulders of leadership of the Marine
Corps, all the way from the neutered Commandant of the Marine Corps on
down to the most junior Corporal. These individuals, the supposed
backbone of the Corps, have allowed themselves to become whores for the
present administration and our insane, born-again Commander-in-Chief and
his band of criminals. America is not long for this world if these pukes
and their robotic followers are somehow not stopped from unleashing WW
III by invading Iran.

I believe that Marine Corps General Chesty Puller would have had the
leaders of the debacle in Haditha Courts-Martialed and shot, and failing
this remedy would have led his men in a mutiny. It is our duty as
Officers and NCO's to disobey illegal orders. The Corps has been ripe
for mutiny for some time now and had we still leaders in our ranks, it
surely would have happened in this illegal war, where illegal acts of
war are now commonplace. The junior enlisted Marines who pulled the
triggers on these civilians are not responsible for their actions. The
orders come from above, the leadership, or what passes for it now. These
are the individuals that are responsible, right up to the maggot that is
our Commander-in-Chief.

If by some miracle we have military investigators and prosecutors who
possess the integrity and courage to assure that the individuals
responsible for this massacre are brought to trial under the Uniform
Code of Military Justice, perhaps some of the stain of this crime will
eventually be washed away.

As for the restoration of integrity and honor in Marine Corps, I believe
it is too late.

Robert S. Finnegan is the Managing Editor of Southeast Asia news and
a former Marine Corps Non-Commissioned Officer. He may be reached at
seanews1@yahoo.com

"Ohio Governor Ted Strickland has a message for President Bush: any plan
to relocate to the US thousands of refugees uprooted by the Iraq war
shouldn't include Ohio.

The administration plans to allow about 7,000 Iraqi refugees to settle
in the United States over the next year, a huge expansion at a time of
mounting international pressure to help millions who have fled their
homes in the nearly four-year-old war.

Strickland -- a Democrat who opposed the war as a US House member --
says Ohioans can't be expected to have open arms for Iraqis displaced by
the war. More than 100 Ohioans have been killed since the war began. The
governor says he has sympathy for the refugees' plight, but he won't ask
Ohioans to accept a greater burden."

It is really all quite mad, isn't it?

That on top of the million or so Iraqis we've killed, and the four
million we've maimed, we've also created millions of refugees; that our
Maniac-in-Chief now decrees 7,000 refugees is a politically acceptable
number we should allow into the U.S. even as he continues the slaughter
around the clock; that the governor of a state, having absolutely
nothing to do with immigration policy anyway, feels compelled to protect
the homeland (or would that be "homestate?") by warning a morbidly
unpopular president, "Not in our backyard, pallie!"

Something for people of good conscience to keep in mind: When we finally
get our troops out of Iraq, and our bases out of Iraq, and our
mercenaries out of Iraq, and our spooks out of Iraq, and Halliburton
Corp., and Burger King Corp., and all the rest - when the last U.S.
helicopter flies off the roof of the world's largest embassy and the
American Empire's sorry, bloody, murderous adventure draws to a close -
we owe these people. Big time.

I don't know how many, or actually, why any of them would want to come
live in Disneyland. But if some do, we should welcome them and the many
lessons they could teach us about maintaining humanity in conditions of
pure hell.

For the 99.9% of Iraqis who would rather stay home and rebuild their
shattered lives, at the very least we owe them money. Lots of money.
Multiple billions of dollars. And not to be administered by our military
or our corporations or our mercenaries or our spooks. No, we should have
nothing to do with that money except deliver it to Iraq and let them
decide what to do with it. I hope they can rebuild the hospitals and the
electric and phone systems we bombed, and the water treatment plants
we've destroyed, and the economy we've wrecked. But frankly it doesn't
matter if they want to insulate their attics with it, or mix it with mud
and turn it into building material, or pile it up in the middle of the
desert and f.....g burn it all. They can't possibly do any worse with it
than we have.

And THAT is just the beginning of the magnitude of the dollar amount we
owe Iraq.

What we do for all the pain and suffering and heartache and terror we've
created, only God knows. Those things we carry on our conscience to our
graves.

And the governor of Ohio wants to be first in line to say, "Keep your
tired and maimed. Don't burden us."

US lawyer
due in Fiji over Iraq killing testimony

Posted at 03:43 on 20 April, 2007 UTC

United States lawyers will arrive in Fiji next month to take evidence
from a former Fijian soldier who claims to have witnessed American
private security guards shooting Iraqi civilians for target practice.

The Daily Post reports that Isireli Naucukidi is in fear of his life if
he goes to America to give evidence.

Mr Naucukidi, who served with the American security company Triple
Canopy in Iraq, has reported three instances of Iraqi civilians being
killed by American security guards employed by the same company on July
8 last year.

He says he has been informed that lawyers representing the company and
the guards implicated in the shootings will be in Fiji from May 8 to
take his evidence.

Mr Naucukidi says he is confident his evidence will stand up in court
because all the evidence is available and will be backed up by a
blackbox in their vehicle which recorded all the conversations.

Mr Naucukidi says he resigned because he did not like the way the issue
was swept under the carpet, including by his Fijian supervisor who
feared losing his job.

Radio New Zealand International

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